The Case Against “The Case for Colonialism”

The Third World Quarterly (TWQ), a reputable academic
journal in international studies, is currently under fire by
academics including Ducks. In its latest issue, it
published an article titled “The Case for Colonialism” by Dr. Bruce
Gilley of Portland State University. In this article, Gilley calls
for a return of colonialism, citing the benefits of a
“colonial governance” agenda over the “good
governance” agenda, which would involve overtaking state
bureaucracies, recolonizing some areas, and creating new colonies
“from scratch.” He argues that this new colonialism
will be: 1) beneficial because it will be chosen by “the
colonized,” and hence, will be legitimate; 2) attractive to
Western conservatives because they are financially low-risk, and to
liberals, because they will be just; and 3) effective because they
will be designed like charter cities, which have proven to be
efficient and effective at governance.

At first glance, the article seems like a bad joke. Can someone,
a scholar no less, actually make a case for colonialism? And
advocate for its return? Also, considering that the TWQ is jointly
involved in creating an award named after Edward Said, the founder
of postcolonial studies, it is especially surprising that the
journal would publish a poor quality article on the subject of
colonialism. The response has been swift. Though there are some
apologists, social media has exploded with criticism against the
author and the journal, even sparking a petition calling for the article’s
retraction. Within a day, the petition gathered over 1500
signatures, with more signing on.

Academia has a duty to
inform with integrity, honesty, and evidence. If scholars and
journals alike are not held to this standard, it provides an
opening for falsehoods and misinformation to take hold, shape
perceptions, and dictate policies.

The problem is not that the article is offensive (which it is).
The problem is that it is empirically and historically inaccurate,
misuses existing postcolonial scholarship, and largely ignores
interdisciplinary approaches to the study of colonial legacies.
There are at least five blatant examples of this. First, in the introduction, Gilley cites
Berney Sèbe’s article that
analyzes imperial figures in Zambian, Nigerian, and Congolese
history, and advocates for replacing the “good
governance” agenda with a “colonial agenda.”
Sèbe’s research is essentially
about the role of colonial history in the creation of
Zambia’s, Nigeria’s, and the Congo’s state
narratives where the state is still grappling with the scars of its
colonial past. Sèbe notes that the rebirth of colonial leaders
as heroes uncovers the profound effect of colonialism on the
state’s nation-building narratives. He further concludes that
these narratives are moving from the post-colonialism calls of
political emancipation toward “a post-racial form of
cosmopolitan nation-building,” which attempts to combine
anti-colonial sentiments with the modern conceptions of nationhood
within African countries that are complex and multi-layered. Gilley
conveniently ignores the latter part of Sèbe’s research, and instead, only
focuses on this resurgence of colonial heroes as evidence of the
failure of anti-colonial rhetoric. Handpicking arguments that fit
into your own theory is bad methodology—and as a professor,
Gilley should know better.

Second, Gilley praises Sèbe’s “cosmopolitan
nation-building” as an “explicit rejection of the
parochial myth of self-governing capacity that drove most
postcolonial countries into the ground” (p.8). Gilley has not
only misused Sèbe’s term but clearly has also
misunderstood it. Sèbe’s use of “cosmopolitan”
is descriptive. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary,
cosmopolitan means “having worldwide rather than limited or
provincial scope.” It does not, as Gilley concludes, reject
the “myth” around postcolonial states governing
capacity. There is ample historical evidence on how almost all
postcolonial states inherited bureaucracies that they could not
immediately manage. The lack of management was not because they did
not know how to govern but was due to a myriad of factors that
involved dealing with scarce resources, an influx of refugees,
internal ideological divisions, and external threats to territory,
as examined by Ayesha Jalal and Bertrand Badie. Gilley’s characterization
of Sèbe’s “cosmopolitan
nation-building,” therefore, is misleading and blatantly
ignores postcolonial scholarship.

Third, Gilley labels decolonization as “sudden,”
which again, is empirically inaccurate. For example, the
decolonization of the Indian sub-continent that resulted in the
independence of Pakistan and India in 1947 can be dated to the
1840s, when calls for independence from the British began.
Likewise, the Indonesian independence movement from the Dutch began
in 1908—and is called the “Year of National
Awakening”—resulting in independence in 1945.
Similarly, Algerian calls for independence from French rule date
back to World War I. After a bloody war of independence, Algeria
was decolonized in 1962. Morocco was also colonized by France and
Spain and gained independence in 1956. There are, therefore,
numerous examples of states that struggled for independence for
decades. This may be news to Gilley but decades of emancipatory
struggles is not “sudden.”

Fourth, Gilley describes anti-colonial literature’s
emphasis on the harmful effects of colonization as biased,
inadequate, and not thorough enough. However, he ignores how
disproportionate the benefits of colonialism were toward colonized
populations. It is true that during their colonial rule, the
British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch built railways,
expanded education systems, improved healthcare, created systems of
taxation, and outlined basic governance infrastructure. And so
Gilley states that a colonial governance agenda “resurrects
the universalism of the liberal peace and with it a
sharedstandard of what a well-governed country looks
like” (p. 8). He uses Alexander De Juan and Jan Henryk Pierskalla’s
article to make this point against anti-colonial critiques. De
Juan and Pierskalla’s article, however, does not advance a
pro-colonial agenda. Instead, it is a literature review showcasing
four areas for growth within interdisciplinary postcolonial
scholarship that include internal dynamics of colonial rule,
disaggregating variables and units of analyses, and investigating
contexts that shaped the consequences of colonial rule.
Furthermore, advancements under colonial rule were not for
everyone; not only did these measures favor elites and
pro-colonizer groups but also created divisions along ethnic,
religious, and linguistic lines within indigenous populations that
continue to exist today. The colonial method of governance,
therefore, was to oppress, violate, and divide resources and
populations—and is thoroughly documented and researched
within political science, sociology, anthropology, and history. For
example, the British exploited differences between the
Hindu and Muslim communities in the sub-continent, creating deep
resentments and divisions that persist today due to the 1947
Partition. Similarly, differences between the Hutus and Tutsis that
led to the Rwandan genocidewere created and exploited by Belgian
colonizers. Historians and anthropologists alike have argued that
these differences were economic, not ethnic. In fact, Hutus and
Tutsis are indistinguishable. Since the genocide, Rwanda
has become a “beacon of hope,” and exemplifies
how reconciliation can eliminate differences
imposed by colonialism.

And fifth, Gilley attributes the abolition of slave-trading to
colonialism, which in addition to being ridiculous, is factually
incorrect. The Portuguese began slavery in the 1500s as they
explored West Africa while the British brought the first
installment of African slaves to Virginia in 1619. Colonizers,
therefore, created the slave trade. Systematic decolonization and
subsequent wars of independence eventually ended the slave
trade.

Academia has a duty to inform with integrity, honesty, and
evidence. If scholars and journals alike are not held to this
standard, it provides an opening for falsehoods and misinformation
to take hold, shape perceptions, and dictate policies. We are
living in a critical political climate, especially in the United
States, where President Trump’s apparent sympathy for radical
right-wing groups is troubling. This kind of scholarship is
dangerous not just because it legitimizes the whitewashing of
academic literature but also stands to undermine U.S. foreign
policy as it taints important scholarship on concepts related to
neocolonialism. Aside from being wrong on the facts, articles like
these merely perpetuate dubious justifications for U.S. military
interventionism and long-term nation-building projects in distant
lands with populations that resent foreign occupation. We should
expect more from scholarly journals.